So I went away on vacation right after the last Rant - to Cape May. Had a lovely time, thank you. Saw the hurricane brush by Labor Day weekend. Came home, went back to work, and didn't write a single rant for a year. Boy, that sucked! But I'm back, and I'm bitter. So a quick update on my life, and I'll cut to the latest thing that has me pissed off.
After a year, we haven't had any tax deductions (I mean kids) yet, and I bought a Blazer instead of the Volvo I was eyeing last summer. I've played a lot of golf. My career has been going well, and Linux Journal and it's online brother, Linux Gazette, both published articles of mine in the last year. Cool!
However, there's a dark side to all this: The IS department I run is built with MacOS based computers. Over the last year, we've diversified our buying patterns and mixed in a lot of clone purchases with our usual Apple purchases. Why? Sometimes the clones offer a system closer to what we need for a particular task, sometimes they are cheaper, sometimes they aren't. But Mac clones have given my company and others like it a welcome set of options in planning our futures. And Apple makes money for selling us an OS with every system we buy.
But Apple wants to change that now. By dragging their feet on licensing negotiations and refusing to certify clones based on the new PowerPC 750 and CHRP architecture, Apple is trying to close the barn door after the horses are gone. There's a new reality in the Mac market - Apple no longer gets to win by showing up. As I said last week in a letter to Steve Jobs:
A lot of the computers I buy are from Apple. But about half of them are from (clonemaker) Power Computing. Apple licensed them to make MacOS compatible computers. If I wind up with orphaned systems because Power had a bad business model - that's a risk I can live with. Wintel companies fail like that daily. But if Power went under because Apple shut them off and chased them out of the market - well, Microsoft, for all their failings, hasn't deliberately screwed a vendor that uses Intel processors or compatibles. And I'll keep that in mind as I toss out my hundred Macintoshes in favor of Windows NT.
What's it gonna be, Mr. Jobs?